Saturday, July 29, 2017

Security researchers from
China-based tech company Tencent have once again demonstrated that they can
remotely hack a Tesla. The
vulnerabilities they leveraged were quickly patched by the carmaker.

Tencent’s Keen Security Lab published a video last year
showing how they could hack a Tesla Model S, both while it was parked and on
the move. They took control of the
sunroof, turn signals, displays, door locks, windshield wipers, mirrors, the
trunk and even the brakes.

At the time, Tesla patched the vulnerabilities within 10
days, but claimed that the vulnerabilities were not as easy to exploit as it
appeared from the video published by Keen Security Lab researchers.

In a new video and blog
post published this week, the researchers claim they’ve once again
managed to hack a Tesla, this time a Model X, via a Controller Area Network
(CAN bus) and Electronic Control Unit (ECU) attack.

…In its video,
Keen Security Lab showed that it managed to remotely unlock the doors and trunk
in parking mode, control the brake in driving mode, and put on a light show
using the car’s headlights and taillights by taking control of multiple ECUs.

Rumba
attempts a foot-ectomy after sticking its foot firmly in its mouth.

iRobot, the maker of Roomba, made big news this week when an interview with its CEO mentioned plans to sell
the map data of customers’ homes to third parties. Today, the company launched damage control
measures and the CEO is spreading assurances that this is all just a big
misunderstanding.

…We reached out
to a spokesperson for iRobot, who tells Gizmodo that Reuters’ original article about iRobot contained “an
unintentional misinterpretation of Colin’s statements.” In fact, Reuters issued a correction today. The paragraph that set off a firestorm has now
replaced the words “sell maps” with “share maps for free with customer
consent.”

…So we know that
Reuters admits to the misunderstanding, but iRobot is still saying that it’s
considering sharing all that map data, just that they won’t sell it for cash. And a great way to guarantee “iRobot will never
sell your data” would be to include those exact words in Roomba’s privacy
policy. But iRobot wouldn’t commit to that.

…We’ve attempted
to get more information about exactly what data is being stored by iRobot but
company reps have avoided specificity.

Critical infrastructure operators
have long faced the formidable security challenges of zero-day vulnerabilities
and advanced persistent threats (APTs), both of which were employed in some of
the most prominent cyberattacks in the sectors to date. But one researcher is warning leaders in
government and industry of an old threat that, fueled by recent legislation and
commercial practices, is quickly surpassing zero days and APTs as perhaps the
greatest risk to critical infrastructure security.

The threat is what might be
called “weaponized metadata,” and the risks are detailed extensively in a new
report, Metadata:
The Most Potent Weapon in this Cyberwar, recently published by the
Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), a Washington,
D.C.-based cybersecurity think tank.

U.S.-executed decapitation strikes are eliminating key
ISIS propaganda leaders and hacking away at the terror group’s ability to
broadcast its jihadist message across the world from its dwindling holdfasts in
Syria and Iraq, Operation Inherent Resolve announced on July 27.

The attack was detailed in a presentation
at the Black Hat security conference this week by WhiteScope founder Billy
Rios, a researcher best known for finding vulnerabilities in medical
devices and industrial control systems (ICS),
and Dr. Jonathan Butts, founder of QED Secure Solutions and committee chair for
the IFIP Working Group on Critical Infrastructure Protection.

The experts pointed out that automated car wash systems
are essentially ICS and, just like industrial systems, they can be hacked and
manipulated.

…Rios and Butts discovered that the web-based
administration panel for the product, which is in many cases accessible
directly from the Internet, has many features, including for sending email
alerts and a widget for social media.

However,
the more problematic issue is that both the owner and engineer accounts for the
web interface are protected by weak
default passwords. They also discovered that the
authentication mechanism can be bypassed by a hacker.

Cyber mercenaries are breaching
the systems of governments, financial institutions, critical infrastructure,
and businesses, then selling access to them on a marketplace on the darknet, a
hidden internet accessible only via specialized software.

All of this is happening on a
darknet black marketplace known as the CMarket or “Criminal Market,” formerly
known as “Babylon APT.” The marketplace
contains a public market, invite-only submarkets, and hacker-for-hire services
ready to breach any network in any country.

The Epoch Times was provided with
analysis, screenshots, and chat logs from the marketplace by darknet
intelligence company BlackOps Cyber. An
undercover operative for the company gained access to the marketplace’s
invite-only sections and grew close to several of its top members.

Wells Fargo & Co.’s campaign to
rebuild customer and shareholder trust just hit another bump, as the bank said it
may have pushed thousands of car buyers into loan defaults and repossessions by
charging them for unwanted insurance.

An internal review of the bank’s auto lending found more
than 500,000 clients may have unwittingly paid for protection against vehicle loss
or damage while making monthly loan payments, even though many drivers already
had their own policies, Wells Fargo said
in a statement late Thursday. The firm said it may pay as much as $80
million to affected clients -- with extra money for as many as 20,000 who lost
cars, “as an expression of our regret.”

Very
timely.My Architecture class will be
discussing metrics this week!

For years, Security has sought the ear of the Board and
claimed it was not offered. Today the
Board is listening; but all too often Security talks in a language that
Business does not understand. There is a
solution, but it is not yet maximized. That
solution is Metrics, a language spoken and understood by both Business and
Security; but not widely or effectively used.

The size of the task can be seen in just two statistics
from Thycotic's 2017 State of Cybersecurity Metrics Annual Report (PDF). Firstly, 1 in 3
companies invest in cybersecurity technologies without any way to measure their
value or effectiveness.

…The second
statistic is that four out of every five companies fail to include business
stakeholders in cybersecurity investment decisions. The result, in combination, is that through no
direct fault of its own, Business
doesn't understand what Security is doing, and has no way of knowing whether it
is effective.

…Using metrics to
demonstrate the overall efficiency or lack of efficiency in a company's
cybersecurity posture is difficult but not impossible. At the moment, however, companies are not
making use of, or even collecting, the statistics that are readily available. For example, four out of five companies never
measure the success of security training investments.

Two out of three companies don't fully measure whether
their disaster recovery will work as planned. And while 80% of breaches involve stolen or
weak credentials (from Verizon's DBIR),
60% of companies still do not adequately protect privileged accounts.

An all too common failure, given low priority.Watch what happens when North Korea crashes
their systems.

SEC must improve how it protects its networks against
cyberattacks, says watchdog

Wall Street’s top U.S. regulator needs to improve the way
it protects its own computer networks from cyber attacks, according to a new
report by a congressional watchdog office.

The 27-page report by the Government Accountability Office
found the Securities and Exchange Commission did not always fully encrypt
sensitive information, used unsupported software, failed to fully implement an
intrusion detection system and made missteps in how it configured its
firewalls, among other things.

“Information security control deficiencies in the SEC
computing environment may jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and
availability of information residing in and processed by its systems,” the GAO
said.

The latest round of
documents published by WikiLeaks as part of a leak dubbed by the organization
“Vault 7” describes several tools allegedly used by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target Mac OS X and other POSIX systems.

The tools, said to be part of a CIA project named “Imperial,” are
called Achilles, Aeris and SeaPea.

Large collections of data are valuable.No surprise that people will want to use a
database that contains information on everyone in the country!

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has registered a case with the Bengaluru
Police against Abhinav Srivastava and Qarth Technologies Pvt Ltd for misusing Aadhaar data obtained from its website without any
authentication.

Chennai-based Qarth Technologies was acquired by India's largest taxi
aggregator Ola in March last year, to help grow its in-house payments service.

…While the report
does not divulge any further details on the nature of the violation, a cyber
expert who did not want to be named speculated that Qarth could have been using
someone else's license to access Aadhaar data for eKYC, which is not allowed as per the
regulations set by the Aadhaar Act.

The report begins: “As state and local courts
progressively convert their business processes from paper to electronic
formats, policies around remote electronic access to court case information by
the public become ever more important. COSCA last addressed this
issue comprehensively in 2002 with a report authored by Martha Steketee and
Alan Carlson that proposed a model policy for public access. At that time, few courts had implemented
electronic filing, so the model policy addressed both manual and electronic
access. In the fifteen years since then,
courts have learned a lot about living in an electronic world and providing
remote access to their case data and documents.Consequently, there is a need to update what we know about this topic
and revise the model policy.”

Can we expect the same for President Trump as he deletes
tweets and blocks people?

A federal court in Virginia ruled that a local politician
violated the free-speech rights of a constituent she banned from her Facebook
page, in a case the judge said raises “important questions” about the
constitutional restrictions that apply to social media accounts of elected
officials.

Perhaps Rolls Royce is showing us what will be possible
with self-driving cars.(This one is not
self-driving.)

Two Swedish ministers lost
their jobs on Thursday over a huge leak of sensitive
data that has rocked
the fragile centre-left government.

But Prime Minister
Stefan Lofven vowed he would be staying on despite speculation he could call a
snap election.

Interior Minister Anders Ygeman, a political
heavyweight previously seen as a likely future prime minister, has resigned,
Lofven said at a press conference, adding that Infrastructure Minister Anna Johansson will also step down.

…The scandal has
blown up in recent weeks after it emerged that an entire database on Swedish
drivers' licences was made available to technicians in the Czech Republic and
Romania, with media reporting that the identities of intelligence agents may
have been jeopardised.

…Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist
kept his job in the reshuffle despite facing claims that, like the interior
minister, he knew about the scandal but failed to tell the premier.

However,
Hultqvist still faces the threat of being forced out in a censure motion
launched by the opposition on Wednesday against all three ministers caught up
in the scandal.

Seattle-based IOActive has
issued a critical security advisory detailing a physical and authentication
bypass in the Diebold Opteva ATM.

"IOActive has discovered two vulnerabilities in
Opteva ATMs with the AFD platform that, when combined," warns the advisory
"may allow an unauthorized user to vend notes from the device."

The combined use of the vulnerabilities is necessary
because of ATMs' practice of separating the safe from the operating system.
Diebold's Opteva line of ATMs with the AFD platform contain an upper cabinet
for the operating system and a lower cabinet for the safe, each with its own
authentication requirements.

North Korea’s Army of Hackers Has a New Target: Bank Accounts
— “Operates Like Organized Crime”

North Korea’s cyberarmy has splintered into multiple
groups and is unleashing orchestrated attacks increasingly focused on funneling
stolen funds to the secretive nation, according to a government-backed South
Korean report released Thursday.

The emphasis on finances represents a significant
shift from Pyongyang’s prior patterns of attack seeking to obtain military
information, destabilize networks or intimidate. It also shows how North Korea’s
fast-evolving—but costly—nuclear-missile program has accelerated its need for
cash as it is subjected to financial sanctions.

…“North Korea now
cares more about making money than causing disruptions or cyberterrorism,” said
Joon Kim, owner of Naru Security Inc., who has advised South Korean law
enforcement on cyber issues.

South Koreans have a unique lens into North Korea’s
cyberoffenses, as Pyongyang’s longest-running and most frequent target. South Korean government groups and agencies
withstand 1.4 million hacking attempts a day, according to law-enforcement and
intelligence officials.

Those
who fail to pay attention are often the first to succumb to new hacks and scams

…Scammers, having noted that mobile
traffic is now greater than PC traffic on a worldwide scale, are starting to
adapt their techniques to take advantage of mobile users. And seeing as how mobile devices tend to be
less protected than PCs, this is a winning move for them.

Visiting the site presents you with an exact replica of
the actual mobile version of Facebook’s homepage, asking you to enter your
credentials so you can log in. A
knowledgeable-but-inattentive user might glance at the URL, see m.facebook.com,
consider the coast clear, and sign in.

Once you enter your credentials, the game is over.

…Keen readers
will note that the actual domain of this suspicious URL is rickytaylk.com

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of
the NoMoreRansom project. The project
comprises an alliance of law enforcement agencies and private industry,
currently totaling 109 partners. Its
purpose is to gather all known ransomware decryptors in one location (the NoMoreRansom website) so that ransomware victims
can at least attempt to decrypt encrypted files.

The project was launched on July 25, 2016
by the Dutch National Police, Europol, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab and now holds
access to 54 decryption tools provided by 9 partners and covering 104
ransomware families. The site itself is
available in 26 languages.

The Kremlin has long denied French President Emmanuel
Macron's allegations of Russian subterfuge during his election campaign, but
three different sources, including a U.S. congressman, have now told Reuters that an attempted surveillance operation on Macron
did take place on social media.

According to the report, around two dozen Facebook
accounts were created in the run-up to the election in attempts to infiltrate
Macron's social circles, likely with malicious intent.

…During the
alleged operation, Russian agents posed as people with common acquaintances of
Macron’s associates and sought personal information about the candidate’s
social life.

…Macron’s
campaign suspected Russian intervention when his team was the target of a hack days
before the election earlier this year, though French authorities have so
far not blamed the cyberattack on any government.

U.S. intelligence agencies told Reuters in May that
hackers with connections to the Russian government were involved in the French
election, but they did not have conclusive evidence that the Kremlin ordered
the hacking.

(Related).Somewhat
of a “Users Guide.”Who would you like
to be elected President in 2020?

“The massive spread of fake news has been identified as a
major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten
democracies. Communication, cognitive,
social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts to study the complex
causes for the viral diffusion of digital misinformation and to develop
solutions, while search and social media platforms are beginning to deploy
countermeasures. However, to date, these
efforts have been mainly informed by anecdotal evidence rather the systematic
data. Here we analyze 14 million
messages spreading 400 thousand claims on Twitter during and following the 2016
U.S. presidential campaign and election. We find evidence that social bots play a key
role in the spread of fake news. Accounts
that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots. Automated accounts are particularly active in
the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential
users. Humans are vulnerable to this
manipulation, retweeting bots who post false news. Successful sources of false and biased claims
are heavily supported by social bots. These
results suggests that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for
mitigating the spread of online misinformation.” [via Pete Weiss]

…The social media
giant’s money will go to Defending Digital Democracy, a group led by former
campaign chairs for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, based at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government.

…At Black Hat, an
IT security conference, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said the
project was born out of the company realizing that no one was taking
responsibility for issues of election hacking.

…Facebook's
efforts in the space come after CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially downplayed the
platform being used as a mechanism to try to influence the election.

"To think [Facebook] influenced the election in any
way is a pretty crazy idea," Zuckerberg said last November after the election.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced Wednesday that
travelers will now be required to place all electronics larger than a cellphone
into separate bins in order to receive X-ray screening.

It’s the latest move from the Trump administration as it
looks to ramp up national security.

…The policy will
not apply to passengers enrolled in TSA’s PreCheck program, and there have not
been any changes to what is allowed in carry-on bags.

Amazon has a secret health care team called 1492 focused on
medical records, virtual doc visits

…The new team is
currently looking at opportunities that involve pushing and pulling data from
legacy electronic medical record systems. If successful, Amazon could make that
information available to consumers and their doctors. It is also hoping to build a platform for
telemedicine, which in turn could make it easier for people to have virtual
consultations with doctors, one of the people said.

Google is killing Instant Search, which rendered search
results in realtime as you typed. The
problem, according to Google, is we all now do most of our searching on smartphones, and Instant Search makes no sense
on smartphones. So killing the feature
is the only sensible option.

On occasion, I find small companies that strike me as
potentially important.This might be
one.

WalkMe raises $75M at a ‘$935M’ valuation for its on-screen
guidance tech

Today, WalkMe —
company that has built a cloud-based platform for businesses to make web and
mobile interfaces and experiences easier to navigate with on-screen guidance
and prompts — has raised $75 million.

…WalkMe’s core
premise is that it builds tools to make a business’s software and apps more
usable by its employees and customers. When it was still a young company, back in
2012, I snarkily compared it to Microsoft’s Clippy, for its mission of offering assistance
and helping show users around different features.

In reality, WalkMe’s platform is more powerful and complex
than this: it observes how a user makes his or her way around a page on the
screen, anticipates what that user might want to do next and notices when there
are problems, and then makes suggestions and other helpful nudges.

It taps into the constant issues that business and
software makers have with UX and UI that keep products from being ultilised
quite how people hope they will be.

…FLARE VM – where
FLARE stands for FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering – is a Windows-based
security distribution inspired by Linux distros such as Kali and REMnux. It was developed by FireEye threat researcher
Peter Kacherginsky in order to address the challenges associated with
maintaining a custom VM.

It provides a platform that includes a comprehensive
collection of security tools that can be used to conduct malware analysis,
reverse engineering, incident response, forensic investigations and penetration
testing. It includes disassemblers,
debuggers, decompilers, static and dynamic analysis, exploitation,
vulnerability assessment, and network analysis tools.

…This acquisition
gives the company some overlapping functionality too, but Cheryl McKinnon, an
analyst with Forrester Research who monitors the content management industry,
says it also gives the company forensics tools, which are new to them.

“It certainly adds, with some overlap, to their eDiscovery
and file analytics portfolio (i.e. , those tools to clean up network drives,
detect sensitive text inside documents, etc.). But OpenText has never had anything focused
more on the forensic side of the discovery business. — that is, more security,
deeper inspection of how information [has been] accessed, copied, etc. So that
forensics side is net new for them,” McKinnon explained.

Not surprisingly, the company is focusing on that forensic
piece in its announcement, but it’s also getting a rich set of eDiscovery
tools, and a customer list that includes 78 of the Fortune 100 companies, according
to the Guidance website.

The British Museum collection on Sketchfab contains 216 3D
models of artifacts in The British Museum's collections. You can view these models in 3D in your web
browser or in a virtual reality viewer. (To view the models in your browser your
browser needs to support WebGL, you can test your browser here). If you have a 3D printer, you can print the
models yourself by downloading the corresponding files from Sketchfab. You can also embed the models into a webpage
as I have done below.

The number of publicly disclosed data compromise events
through June 30 remained in line with the number of breaches disclosed mid-way
through 2015 and 2016, but the total number of records exposed surpassed 2016’s year-end high mark.

The top 10 data breaches exposed 5.6 billion of the 6
billion records compromised, and had an average severity score of 9.82 out of
10.0, Risk Based Security’s report (PDF) reveals.

(Related). Sounds
small compared to the cost of all security breaches, but smaller victims are
hit hard.

Ransomware victims have
paid more than $25 million in ransoms over the last two years, according to a
study presented today by researchers at Google, Chainalysis, UC San Diego, and
the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. By
following those payments through the blockchain and comparing them against
known samples, researchers were able to build a comprehensive picture of the
ransomware ecosystem.

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS),
Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today launched a revised web tool that puts
important information into the hands of individuals, empowering them to better
identify recent breaches of health information and to learn how all breaches of
health information are investigated and successfully resolved. The HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool (HBRT)
features improved navigation for both those looking for information on breaches
and ease-of-use for organizations reporting incidents.

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of
Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama
years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans
or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly
declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy
agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on
July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil
Liberties Union.

They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI
disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice
Department's national security division during President Obama’s tenure between
2009 and 2016.

…The NSA says
that the missteps amount to a small number — less than 1 percent —
when compared to the hundreds of thousands of specific phone numbers and email
addresses the agencies intercepted through the so-called Section 702
warrantless spying program created by Congress in late 2008.

I wonder how our intelligence services are using
this.Could we be supplying a bit of
propaganda?Trolling for potential
defectors?Attempting to recruit regime
changers?

Telecommunications
capability in North Korea is three-tiered. The vast majority of people have neither internet
nor North Korean intranet connectivity -- they simply have mobile telephony
voice, text and picture/video messaging within the domestic provider, Koryolink.

A small group of others, including university students,
scientists and some government officials, can access the state-run North Korean
intranet, Kwangmyong, that links libraries, universities and government
departments and comprises a limited number of domestic websites.

A much smaller group from the ruling elite does, however,
have full access to the internet. From
April 1 through July 6, 2017, Recorded Future analyzed internet traffic from
this small group of officials, and concluded that the standard view of North
Korea is not entirely accurate: its leadership at least is not isolated from
the rest of the world.

In
a report and analysis conducted in partnership with Team Cymru and published today, Recorded Future notes that North Korean
leadership's internet activity is little different to the rest of the world's
internet activity: "North Koreans spend much of their time online checking
social media accounts, searching the web, and browsing Amazon and
Alibaba," notes the report. "Facebook
is the most widely used social networking site for North Koreans, despite
reports that it, Twitter, YouTube, and a number of others were blocked by North
Korean censors in April 2016."

In June, Canada's Supreme
Court came down on Google—hard. It ruled
that the tech giant must take down certain Google search results for pirated
products. And not just in Canada, but
globally. Now, Google is going south of
the Canadian border to push back on this landmark court ruling. The tech giant filed an injunction Monday with the US District Court for
Northern California, arguing that globally removing the search results violates
US law, and thus Google should not be forced to comply with the Canadian
ruling.

Because the case had already made its way to the highest
court in Canada, Google should have not been able to fight the ruling. But Google is hoping to find a loophole on
American soil by arguing this violates the First Amendment.

“We’re taking this court action to defend
the legal principle that one country shouldn’t be able to decide what
information people in other countries can access online,” says David Price,
senior product counsel at Google. “Undermining
this core principle inevitably leads to a world where internet users are
subject to the most restrictive content limitations from every country.”

Paying To Promote News Stories On Facebook Is The Ad World’s
Favorite New Tactic

When the workplace gossip app Blind expanded its product’s
availability earlier this summer, it got the word out via an age-old tactic:
advertising. But instead of running a
traditional ad campaign, the company took a route gaining favor among
advertisers big and small: It paid Facebook to promote a favorable review of
its service.

Blind spent thousands of dollars promoting a Mashable
article headlined “Silicon Valley's secret app Blind opens the floodgates.” The post drove more than 11,000 visits to its
app download page, according to publicly available analytics. The campaign worked out nicely for Blind — and
for Facebook, a master at making money off of other people’s content. But Mashable, which sells advertising to
companies like Blind, didn’t see a dime. Neither did any other traditional publisher.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Blockbuster modernized the movie rental business. It offered far more movies than its smaller
rivals, used computers to better manage that inventory, and designed its stores
to be bright and family friendly. By
1993, just eight years after its founding, Blockbuster was the global leader in
movie rentals, with more than 3,400 stores worldwide.

Then Netflix happened. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010.

Economist Luigi Zingales mentions the Blockbuster story in
a recent
paper as an example of how the economy ought to work. A company has an innovative idea, which for a
while provides competitive advantage. Later on, a new innovator comes along and
pushes it aside.

But Zingales fears that this isn’t happening as often as
it should. Instead, he argues, the U.S.
economy may be succumbing to what he calls “the Medici cycle,” named for the
powerful family of medieval Florence. Their motto — or at least the motto often
attributed to them — was “Money to get power. Power to protect money.” And Zingales fears that a version of this
motto aptly describes the true strategy of at least some of corporate America.

Zingales’s paper is the latest in a flurry of research
and commentary on the rising concentration of corporate power
in the U.S.

A slight exaggeration but I wonder why President Trump
hasn’t claimed victory?

Now hiring every available human: Amazon posts 50,000
warehouse jobs in U.S.

…Of those postings, 10,000 are for
part-time gigs, while the rest are for full-time positions. The roles span the
duties required to “pick, pack, and ship customer orders” across its various
warehouses, the company said.
Back in January, Amazon
said it would increase its U.S. headcount over the next 18 months to
280,000 employees, an increase of around 55 percent.

…The company is
hosting job fairs at 10 of its fulfillment centers on August 2 to give
candidates a look inside, and it plans to make job offers to some candidates on
the spot.

For my students, because I want recent article, nothing
more than two years back.(200 Internet
years)

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

WannaCry stormed the world in mid-May by leveraging a previously patched
exploit called EternalBlue,
which hacker group Shadow Brokers allegedly stole from the NSA-linked Equation
Group. The ransomware mostly infected Windows 7
computers that hadn’t been patched in due time, and also revealed
the destructive impact of a global outbreak. NotPetya
confirmed the risk in late June.

According to a survey (PDF)
from software lifecycle automation solutions provider 1E, 86% of the
organizations in the U.S. had to “divert significant resources” to safeguard
themselves during the WannaCry attack. Only
14% of the respondents revealed their organization was prepared for such an
attack.

The study also shows that 86% of organizations don’t apply
patches immediately after they are released, thus leaving endpoints and entire networks
exposed to such attacks. While 14% of
respondents said they apply patches immediately, 36% apply them within one week
after release, and 27% need up to a month for that, while 23% don’t apply
patches within a month after release.

It’s the same with vampires.You are only at risk when you invite them
in.

iRobot,
creator of the Roomba,
plans to sell the data the house-cleaning robot collects when it maps your
house. Potential buyers include smart home
device manufacturers, such as Amazon, Apple and Google.

iRobot's business strategy hinges on regular updates[Because furniture moves, not walls.Bob] and understanding the floor plan of your home, according to Reuters.

…Roombas have
been mapping homes since 2015 using a camera and sensors or visual localisation
and cloud-connected app control. The
Roomba uses these maps to avoid toppling over lamps and ramming into your
furniture. It was made
compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in March.

Ubiquitous surveillance.Is it possible to go unnoticed and unrecorded?

Google’s latest update keeps a screenshot for later. Much like how Google Maps remembers everywhere
you’ve ever been so you can find your car, Google (the search engine app) keeps a
snapshot history of what you’ve searched for in Google Search. This search history does not make a
significant impact on your smartphone’s data storage space as it’s all stored
with Google on Google’s servers.

Is this why United, TSA clashed on Twitter over comic books
on planes?

Passengers flying with United Airlines UAL, out of San
Diego — site of the popular Comic-Con event this weekend — were greeted by a
message telling them to remove books from their checked luggage. United then responded on Twitter to a post
with a picture of the message saying the requirement was set by the
Transportation Security Administration.

Subsequently, the TSA sent out its own tweet noting that
there are no restrictions on checking books, which a spokesperson confirmed to
MarketWatch.

[At 8am on July 24, 2017] the National Archives released a
group of documents (the first of several expected releases), along with 17
audio files, previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection
Act of 1992. The materials released
today are available online only. Access to the original paper records will
occur at a future date. Download the
files online: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release.
Highlights of this release include 17
audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the
United States in January 1964. Nosenko
claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald
during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January,
February, and July of 1964. This set of
3,810 documents is the first to be processed for release, and includes FBI and
CIA records—441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents
previously released with portions redacted. In some cases, only the previously redacted
pages of documents will be released. The
previously released portions of the file can be requested and viewed in person
at the National Archives at College Park
(these records are not online). The
re-review of these documents was undertaken in accordance with the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Act of 1992, which states: “Each assassination
record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no
later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act,
unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that continued
postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm. The act mandated that all
assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National
Archives and defined five categories of information that
could be withheld from release. The act
also established the Assassination Records Review Board to weigh agency
decisions to postpone the release of records. The National Archives established the John F.
Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of
approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection (88
percent) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s.
The records at issue are documents
previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.
Federal agencies have been re-reviewing
their previously withheld records for release, and will appeal to the President
if they determine that records require further postponement. Online resources:

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.